Manual tools used in cellular manipulation are often single use, single application devices. Mechanical removal of a portion of cell cultures, also known as wounding, results in the physical separation of one or more cells from a cell monolayer. The remaining cells are allowed to recover the area by a process known as reepithelialization. Presently, most of the current techniques for cell removal from a desired cell culture are difficult to perform on a large scale basis in a fast and consistent way when screening for cell migration.
Most of the known cell wounding devices require individual processing in an individual sample well. The repeated application of known cell wounding methods has been used to wound cells to observe total polysaccharides from Si-Jun-Zi decoction in the re-epithelialization of wounded rat intestinal epithelial cells (IEC-6 cells). A similar application of the traditional method of cellular wounding is being applied to observe ginsenoside Rg1 in wounded human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs).
Apart from the device and related method disclosed herein, there is no known simple method to produce multiple and consistent mechanical wounding of confluent cells for screening of multiple samples. Therefore, a high-throughput wounding method is necessary in order to achieve this goal.